Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture

One of the issues underlying current debates between practitioners of art history, visual culture and aesthetics is whether the visual is a unique, irreducible category, or whether it can be assimilated with the textual or verbal without any significant loss. Can paintings, buildings or installations be 'read' in the way texts are read or deciphered, or do works of visual art ask for their own kind of appreciation? This is not only a question of choosing the right method in dealing with visual works of art, but also an issue that touches on the roots of the disciplines involved: can a case be made for the visual as an irreducible category of art, and if so, how is it best studied and appreciated? In this anthology, this question is approached from the angles of three disciplines: aesthetics, visual culture and art history. Unlike many existing overviews of visual culture studies, it includes both painting and architecture, and investigates historical ways of defining and appreciating the visual in their own, contemporary terms.